How did the Nationalist Socialist Underground's decade-long killing spree escape the notice of authorities?

November 19, 2018

On June 27, 2001, Ali Taşköprü drove to the market in Hamburg
to buy cigarettes. When he returned to his family’s store he noticed a dark
liquid on the floor: a pool of blood. Behind the counter lay his son Süleyman.
“I put his head in my lap,” he said afterward. “He was trying to tell me
something, but he couldn’t anymore.” It would take ten years for Taşköprü, a Turkish-German who had lived in
Germany for decades, to find out what happened to his son.

The mystery began to unravel with a
seemingly unrelated incident. On November 4, 2011, police closed in on a
trailer in Eisenach
used by Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, who they suspected had robbed a bank nearby.
When the police arrived, Mundlos and Böhnhardt killed themselves and set fire
to the trailer. Hours later, a woman named Beate Zschäpe set fire to an apartment
in Zwickau that she had shared with the two men, and fled. On the run, Zschäpe
mailed out several copies of a video claiming responsibility for a slew of
killings and bombings stretching from 1999 to 2007—including the murder of Süleyman Taşköprü.

The video, a ghoulish document that
combined footage from the crime scenes with jokey bits involving the Pink
Panther, made clear that these events were part
of a campaign of rightwing terror that had never been recognized as such by
authorities when it was unfolding. Zschäpe’s neo-Nazi group, which called itself the National Socialist Underground
(NSU), had murdered ten people throughout Germany and
maimed many others.

With the exception of a policewoman,
all the victims were gunned down execution-style in their places of business in
broad daylight, with the same Ceska pistol fitted with a silencer. Eight of the
victims were Turkish or German citizens of Turkish background (one was Greek). The
policewoman, Michèle Kiesewetter, was the only victim the terrorists would have
considered “authentically” German. The NSU also set off a bomb at a Turkish
café in Nuremberg in 1998, and two more bombs in immigrant areas in Cologne in 2001
and 2004. They committed at least 15 bank robberies to finance their life
underground.

When Zschäpe’s video was released,
the awful scope of the NSU’s terror campaign shocked the country. Chancellor
Angela Merkel met with the victims’ families to offer apologies. German media framed
the NSU’s actions as a national shame. The Bundestag and the German state
parliaments convened investigative committees to find out why the police were
unable to connect the dots on a neo-Nazi killing spree. A trilogy of movies
aired on national public television, while plaques and memorials mark many of
the crime scenes. Hamburg even renamed a street after Süleyman Taşköprü.

To most Germans these modes of memorialization were familiar: They explicitly followed scripts established around Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. This was surely a sign of how seriously Germans took the NSU’s actions. But, in a curious way, the response turned out to be too much and too little at once. Despite a media onslaught, few were willing to examine the conditions that made the NSU possible in the first place. Exhausting levels of detail piled up, but central questions remained about Germany’s relationship to Nazism past and present.

The criminal trial of Beate Zschäpe
and four suspected accomplices began in 2013 in Munich. Any hope that the trial
would provide answers to those questions was quickly dashed: The proceedings degenerated
into an enervating, confusing morass. Neo-Nazis were a menacing presence inside
the courtroom and outside of it. Most of the defendants did what they could to slow
down the trial. Zschäpe remained almost entirely silent, communicating through lengthy statements read by her attorneys. Press accreditation was
severely curtailed, while questions the victims’ families had put before the
court through their attorneys were ignored.

Despite a media onslaught, few were willing to examine the conditions
that made the NSU possible in the first place.

The trial ended only in July of
this year. Last month, a small publishing house in Munich released the
transcripts in a book, NSU Prozess. Das Protokoll
(The NSU Trial. The Record.). The
document not only gives Germans a full, unadulterated record of the trial for
the first time, but also demonstrates how deeply rooted neo-Nazism is in
certain parts of German society and how ill-equipped the German state is to
tackle this challenge.

The questions raised by the trial
eerily echo those raised by the seemingly unstoppable ascent of the far right
in Germany in the past decade. The same year the trial began, the far-right
party Alternative for Germany (AfD) formed. The next year it won 12 percent of
the vote in Brandenburg state, and by this fall it was represented in all 16 German
state parliaments. In the 2017 federal election, it won 12.6 percent of the
vote, marking an ominous turning point in Germany’s postwar politics.

The AfD’s specter loomed over the
proceedings in Munich. Would the German state be able to act as a guardian of a
pluralistic, multi-ethnic country? Would the general miasma of national shame
congeal into a specific account of who bore responsibility? And would this lengthy
trial shed light on what had made the NSU possible—on what had allowed it to
thrive and murder in the shadows for nearly ten years?

In the book’s introduction, the
four journalists who compiled the transcripts of the trial—Annette Ramelsberger,
Wiebke Ramm, Tanjev Schultz, and Rainer Stadler—come to a clear conclusion: The
trial “did not succeed.” That is because, they say, the prosecution was focused
above all on the five defendants, and declared any mutterings of a more
systemic problem “a will-o’-the-wisp, like the buzz of flies in our ears.” That
this buzz came from the victims’ relatives seemed to matter little.

In addition to being a historically
important document, the book is simply an astonishing object: 2,000 pages, five
volumes, crammed so full of information that the bios of the authors are included
only as a small insert. This in spite of the fact that, since the NSU trial was
neither televised nor recorded, the four journalists had to literally
stenograph what they heard in the courtroom, day after day, for 438 days.

Keeping track of the cast of
characters alone was no easy task. German law allows victims to hire attorneys
to function as “co-plaintiffs’ attorneys,” who can call and cross-examine
witnesses. So while the government’s prosecution team was composed of three jurists,
the victims of the NSU’s killings and bombings were represented by 58 attorneys.
The five defendants, for their part, had a grand total of 14 attorneys present;
Zschäpe herself began with three, whom she tried to fire halfway through the trial.
The judge ruled that they had to remain by her side anyway, and for years Zschäpe,
her new attorneys, and her fired attorneys shared a bench without her
dignifying her former attorneys with a single glance.

For 248 days Zschäpe remained
silent. Then she had her new legal team read a statement that disavowed
everything. She had once been a Nazi, she claimed, but had changed her ways while
living underground. Mundlos and Böhnhardt had continued to murder in the name
of her old ideology without her involvement.

Her co-defendants,
as the editors point out, represented different facets of German neo-Nazism. There
was Ralf Wohlleben, a functionary for the far-right NPD party who seemed eager
to lay claim to a bourgeois sort of respectability; André Eminger, a tattooed skinhead
and self-declared “committed national socialist”; Holger Gerlach, a dimwitted
loser who had finally found a tribe; and Carsten Schultze, who had left the neo-Nazi
fold decades ago and genuinely seemed stricken about what he had allowed to
happen.

Both Wohlleben and Schultze were
indicted for their role in procuring a weapon for the killers, Eminger as an
accessory to the bombings and several robberies. He and Gerlach were further
indicted for the “formation of a terrorist group.” Zschäpe’s defense argued in
closing that neither Zschäpe nor the other defendants could be said to be have
formed a “terrorist group,” as German law requires a group to have at least
three members. The lawyers claimed their client was unfairly tied to Böhnhardt
and Mundlos, simply because she lived with them for the entire duration of their
crimes. Where the prosecution saw a group, the defense wanted the judges to see
only individuals, who may have been friends and roommates, and who may have
shared an ideology, but did none of the things they did in concert with one
another.

The transcripts show how carefully
the prosecution punctured that fantasy: They were able to connect the fairly
obvious dots suggesting that, yes, these people meant to start a terror cell
when they first went underground in 1998, and, yes, their helpers either knew what they were
doing or had a good-enough idea.

But the editors point out that the trial went
beyond the crimes of these five defendants. They call it “a deep core drill
into German history, unearthing dangerous sediments underneath a surface of economic
prosperity and seemingly firmly established democratic values.” In her closing arguments,
the federal prosecutor Annette Greger claimed that “the motive of all these
crimes was a far right ideology, the fever dream of a country free of
foreigners, and the intention to shake this free, this friendly country, in
which we live, to its core, in order to prepare the ground for a disgusting
Nazi regime.”

Whatever else
the NSU was, it wasn’t an outlier. Rather it was deeply consonant with a cruel,
nationalist streak in German politics that is only getting stronger.

In other words, the prosecution
found itself in the somewhat schizophrenic position of wanting to establish a conspiracy—these
five people, plus the two dead ones, had been an organization—but not too much of
one. They aimed not only to secure verdicts against these five defendants, but
also to position their crimes as malignant outliers in “this free, this friendly
country.” But the victims’ attorneys presented a different story: Whatever else
the NSU was, it wasn’t an outlier. Rather it was deeply consonant with a cruel,
nationalist streak in German politics that is only getting stronger.

From the day the NSU was finally
discovered, the central question was how they had been able to carry on in
secret for so long. There has long been a sense that German security forces are
“blind on the right side,” as Germans put it. For the Federal Criminal Bureau
(BKA) and the Constitutional Protection Service (BfV), “terrorism” invariably meant
left-wing terrorism. And since 9/11, it
had meant either left-wing or Islamist terrorism. As in the United States, the
security forces frequently downplayed or ignored right-wing violence altogether.
They were unwilling to recognize any larger structure to it, preferring to see irrational
flare-ups where others saw evidence of broader forces at work.

At other times the security forces
implicitly condoned right-wing activity. Earlier this year, it was revealed
that Hans-Georg Maaßen, head of the Constitutional Protection Service (BfV),
had met years ago with politicians from the AfD to suggest ways of keeping the
party off his own Service’s radar. And after neo-Nazis and members of the AfD
marauded through the town of Chemnitz earlier this year, chasing people they
took to be immigrants, Maaßen gave interviews calling reports about these
events fake news—based not on his own agency’s investigative work, it turned
out, but on videos and memes circulating in far-right circles. Maaßen was
finally fired in early November.

Only thanks to the efforts of the co-plaintiffs’
attorneys, acting for the victims, do the police, the BKA, and the BfV remain a
presence in these transcripts. Which is crucial, as
the police cut a disturbingly large figure in the NSU story. For example, the police let the trio slip away during the initial search of their
garage in 1998, which was itself rented from a policeman. After the crimes were
discovered in 2011 the BfV immediately began collecting and shredding files
pertaining to right-wing infiltration. And in all those years police allegedly
saw nothing, or saw only immigrant-on-immigrant violence.

Before the NSU published their
video, their assassinations were known as the “Döner-killings,” after the type
of kebab immensely popular in Germany. Investigators seemed determined to seek
the origins of these shocking crimes amongst the immigrant communities they
terrorized. One of the task forces on the case, for example, was code-named
“Bosporus.” When a witness identified as Beate K. went to the police after one
of the crimes, she was shown mostly pictures of Turkish men as potential
suspects. She was also asked to opine “whether the Turkish mafia might be
behind it: weapons smuggling, money laundering.” In the case of the murdered
policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter, the NSU’s final victim, authorities came to
focus on a Roma family that had been somewhere in the vicinity of the crime
scene, obsessively tracking their travels across Europe.

Beate Zschäpe appearing at a Munich court in July 2018.CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP/Getty Images

The trial transcripts show that
this compulsion was shared by an entire society—that the same prejudices that governed
the investigators were at work in most non-immigrant witnesses. When Mundlos
and Böhnhardt murdered Süleyman Tasköprü, a witness claimed she had heard two
men arguing beforehand “in a foreign language.” When another witness crossed
paths with Mundlos and Böhnhardt immediately after the murder of İsmail Yaşar in Nuremberg, she initially
described them as “southern types,” i.e. ethnically non-German. The press operated
with much the same biases: The left-leaning weekly Der Spiegel fantasized in 2011 that the killings were clearly the
work of Turkish ulta-nationalists—“the shot in the face a sign … for a loss of
honor,” the murders an indication that Turks lived in a “dark parallel society”
within Germany.

The NSU transcripts tell of a state
and a society that couldn’t have seen what the NSU was doing, even if they had bothered
to try. Their blinkers were so powerful that the authorities often turned their
suspicions on the victims. With regard to almost all of the nine victims who
were either immigrants or of immigrant descent—and, tellingly, not in the case
of the dead policewoman—the police got it into their heads that the family’s
stupefied trauma was actually “a cartel of silence” that they would have to
break. In one case, they told a widow that her slain husband had been having an
affair with a German woman and had two children by her. In another, they staked
out a victim’s widow’s home. They questioned the families about organized
crime, about drugs, about the outlawed Kurdish party PKK.

The NSU transcripts tell of a state
and a society that couldn’t have seen what the NSU was doing, even if they had bothered
to try.

Who has a right to be silent and
whose silence is criminalized? The state’s position in this question is all too
clear throughout the trial. One is struck by the persistent silence that greets
the phalanx of prosecutors and victims’ attorneys in these transcripts. When Zschäpe
finally speaks, it is, as one family member of a victim put it, almost like
“she was mocking us”: She denies everything, gets bogged down in pointless
details, and offers hollow apologies and disavowals of her “former” beliefs.
Indeed, her team argues that she is a victim herself. Again and again, the
defense attorneys worry that their clients are being tried in the media and
prejudged. All the wrongs that had been visited on the victims’ families for ten years, they sought to reclaim, implausibly,
for their clients.

It is a sound legal strategy, of
course, part of a zealous defense. But, as the editors point out, what happened
in the courtroom could not but resonate outside of it. It is telling that discounting
the victimization of others while angrily claiming victimhood for yourself has
been a central strategy of the AfD during its rise. The party has shown a Trumpian
knack for casting people hurling bricks at housing for refugees as concerned
citizens, and terrified refugees as dangerous predators. Whether
they want to close the borders, set fire to kebab shops, or beat up refugees, an
increasing number of Germans are ready, even eager, to withhold empathy from the
persecuted and present themselves as the real victims.

In her closing arguments, prosecutor
Greger claimed that Zschäpe, Mundlos, and Böhnhardt hated the police and the
state they represented. The NSU’s campaign was aimed at delegitimizing the
German state, an accusation corroborated by the massive lists found in their
various hideouts contain the addresses of members of the Bundestag and centrist political organizations.

But if the German mainstream was a theoretical
target of the NSU, it wasn’t a target the NSU ever actually attacked. With the one,
still mysterious exception of the attack on two members of the police in
Heilbronn in southern Germany, which resulted in the death of Kiesewetter, the
NSU killed immigrants. It killed in kebab shops and bodegas, in internet cafes
and flower stands. In 15 bank robberies not a single person was killed, though
several were shot. The bank robberies almost all took place in the former
communist East, in areas that have few immigrant communities. In contrast, all but
one of the NSU’s killings took place in former West Germany, and all of them occurred
in large, diverse communities. Whatever the NSU took itself to be attacking, it
was far more specific than the German state writ large.

Carsten Schultze appearing at a court in Munich in June 2013.CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP/Getty Images

Did members of the NSU act alone? In
the NSU’s lists of potential targets, victims’ attorney Mehmet Daimagüler
points out, there is a Turkish-German prosecutor in the small Westphalian town
of Siegen. Daimagüler grew up in Siegen, he practiced law there—yet he had
never heard of this man. How had the NSU? As Elif Kubaşık, whose husband was murdered in his kiosk in
Dortmund in 2006, remarked: “Did they have helpers in Dortmund? Do I still see
them around town sometime?”

The slogan that rightwing protesters
chant as they march through the cities, especially in East Germany, is “we are
the people.” Whether or not the NSU’s enormous lists are evidence of an
extensive network of helpers, informers, and fellow travelers, or whether they
were meant merely to create that appearance, almost doesn’t matter. They are
meant to raise Elif Kubaşık’s
question, and they are meant to make people like her look over their shoulder
in their own country. Even if we believe that they carried out their actions unbeknownst
to anyone around them, the NSU did not really act alone. They could count on society’s
biases and prejudices, on a rising politics of resentment, to sustain them at
least for a time.

Some of the more moving moments in
these trial transcripts consist of the otherwise fairly neutral panel of judges
going above and beyond what is necessary for purely evidentiary reasons to ask
the victims’ families about their lives since the attacks. It is as though they
wanted to acknowledge that while the violence done to these families cannot be
undone, the persistent abstracting away of their suffering can at least be
reversed. Towards the end of the trial Dilek Özcan, daughter of İsmail Yaşar, addressed Carsten Schultze,
the only defendant who showed remorse: “They told me that you, among all the
defendants, were the only one who didn’t look away when they put pictures of
the dead up on the screen, and that your eyes were wide with horror.” Someone
finally seeing what they have allowed to happen is the best these families
could hope for in this trial.

In the end, Schultze’s evident agony
didn’t help him much. While Zschäpe got the maximum allowed by German law (15
years without the possibility of parole), Schultze was the only one of the four
other defendants who got exactly what prosecutors had asked for. André Eminger was
sentenced to time served and was released hours later to the hooting of his
supporters. Less than a week later Ralf Wohlleben left prison. Their strategy
of keeping mum, and of presenting themselves as victims, had worked. As of November, only Zschäpe and Schulze remain in prison. As Annette Ramelsberger, one
of the editors of this staggering document, put it on the day the NSU trial
ended: “Contrition isn’t worth it, it turns out. Silence is. The far right will
learn that lesson all too well.”

Adrian Daub is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.